Reverse Outsourcing Deal Boosts Newhallville

(3/15/2013) New Haven Independent - Women getting mammograms in Chennai, India, will have a better chance of their doctors spotting problems, thanks to a deal with Newhallville inventor Fitz Walker.

Walker (pictured) Thursday announced that his company, Bartron Medical Imaging, has signed a multimillion-dollar deal with a university hospital in Chennai.

The contract allows for the first real-life application of NASA-inspired medical imaging technology Walker has been developing for over a decade. He started out in his garage on Blake Street, wiring together discarded desktop PCs into a supercomputer. Now he works out of a lab on Shelton Avenue.

The India deal is just the beginning, Walker said. His Bartron firm is already in talks with hospitals all over the world and is about expand rapidly. Walker said he could add as many as 100 more employees to his 10-person company.

The deal also represents a reversal of the outsourcing trend in the medical industry. Instead of Indian doctors looking at American radiology images remotely, American computers will be working remotely on Indian images.

“We’re doing ‘insourcing,’ rather than outsourcing,” said Jit Mitra, a Bartron staffer who has been working on the deal.